1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of data compression and, more specifically, to selective compression of synchronized content based on a calculated compression ratio.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently there has been an explosion of computing devices that operate on limited resources. One type of device is the mobile phone, which is becoming heavily used for many applications. Mobile phones are performing applications such as sending and receiving email, storing contact information, and document manipulation. As a portable work center, it is sometimes important that data on the mobile phone is synchronized to a central data store or to other peer devices. This synchronization can utilize an abundance of resources on a device such as a mobile phone. Synchronization can also require a significant amount of content to be conveyed over a network which can result in substantial network provider carrier fees.
One effort to reduce resource consumption, particularly data transmission bandwidth, is to compress the synchronized data. Most synchronized content can be compressed using either a lossy or lossless encoding, depending on the situation. Lossless compression can, in some cases, make the synchronized content much larger and result in wasted resources. Further, lossy compression can sometimes result in marginal size gains, yet still expend computing resources and degrade content quality. It would be beneficial to know prior to compression whether a favorable compression outcome can be expected, which no known synchronization system or method is presently capable of doing.